[misto]

I do not like the title either, but I do understand the motivation of taking all those "non-software engineering", technical roles and putting them under the same umbrella, due to a lack for a better title, because a company might not afford to have separate roles for each of those areas you have listed above.

"OPERATIONS ENGINEER" might work, but it raises another set of problems, e.g. does it imply operational responsibility (on-duty) work, which I don't think is a given in DevOps jobs nowadays.

[remram]

What's wrong with system administrator? IT specialist? Cloud engineer? Reliability expert?

There are many options that don't tack "dev" into your non-dev job titles.

[misto]

Did you even read my comment? None of your provided alternatives solve the issue of the current market being in demand of such a wide set of skills outside of the "normal software development" practice (whatever that even is), that labeling all of those under whatever title will get some people butthurt.

If its a matter of gatekeeping the "developer" status, go read some actual job posts with the title DevOps in them. Its not uncommon to come across proficiency requirements in at least one programming language (e.g. Go/Python/Rust), used in automation libraries, cli tools or whatever, which the applicants are expected to "develop". Or is it just constructions that can be developed?

[remram]

If you start on that tone, you get what you ask for. I will obviously not read this comment.